Segregation

Social structural factors

Patterns of racial and ethnic segregation

Ideological bases of segregation

Segregation and prejudice

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Segregation is an institutionalized form of social distance expressed in physical separation. It signifies a convergence of physical and social space and is to be distinguished from other social forms which also structure social distance in spatial terms, as, for example, the elaborate patterns of deference in African societies with sacred kingship or the different levels of seating (reflecting caste status) among Singhalese castes. The latter regulate social relationships between persons in situations of contact; segregation refers primarily to the separation of persons and the avoidance of contact.

Systems of segregation vary in the criteria which distinguish the segregated groups, whether biological, cultural, and/or status, and in the situations, or roles, which are segregated. Segregated roles may vary in extensiveness (extreme separation being represented by indirect rule in colonial society), in type (the intimate roles of primary relationships or the more impersonal roles in secondary relationships), and in the relative level of the actors (for example, where equal-status contacts are proscribed but dominant-subordinate contacts are fostered, as in racial segregation, or apartheid, in South Africa). Segregative systems may also be distinguished as compulsory or voluntary, as deliberate or spontaneous, and as influenced positively by attraction or negatively by disdain. Compulsory segregation involves deliberation and invidious distinction and serves the interests of those who impose it.

Although segregation imposes separation of persons and groups, it is by no means the antithesis of societal integration. The segregation of units may be a basis for integration, as in traditional Indian caste society, where a consensual basis for segregation was derived partly from shared religious values. Indeed, segregation may be conceived of as a general, although not a universal, aspect of social organization. It defines the boundaries between groups, locates the groups in the hierarchy, and regulates their interaction. Because of the intimate relationship of segregation to systems of domination, it is often highly resistant to change and readily becomes a focus of political conflict.

Sociological approaches. Early sociological concern with segregation derived in part from interest in the processes of social interaction (segregation being conceived of as “dissociative,” in terms of a model of “attraction-repulsion” or “association-dissociation”) but mainly from ecological studies, under the influence of animal and plant ecologists, geographers, and the theory of social Darwinism. The initial emphasis on the biotic approach stressed the subsocial elements in human society, with the corollary, explicit or implied, that segregation was a natural phenomenon; there was the same implication in the concept of natural areas [seeREGION].

By contrast, the cultural approach, which developed in criticism of the biotic, stresses the influence of values on the spatial distribution of urban populations, especially the role of prejudice and discrimination in the segregation of ethnic and racial groups. Sociologists share with social psychologists and political scientists an interest in the psychological consequences of segregation as it affects the processes of prejudice, consensus, and political cleavage. And this interest has been further stimulated by the struggle for desegregation in the United States—a major focus of the movement to secure effective civil rights for Negroes–and by the threat of racial civil war in South Africa, which has a regime of systematic racial and ethnic segregation.

Social structural factors

Segregation, being an aspect of social structure, varies in its incidence and nature with the type of society. It hardly exists in relatively undifferentiated societies, such as those of the Bushmen; and the term is not really applicable to the divisions between kin groups in segmented societies, which constitute separate rather than segregated units, loosely federated in certain situations.

Social differentiation. While segregation is associated with social differentiation, there does not appear to be a precise relationship between the two. Segregation may be highly elaborated both in societies where the division of labor is not greatly advanced and in modern industrialized societies. Thus, segregation is a basic principle of organization in the village communities of Indian caste society, where it regulates residence, access to amenities, and contact between the castes and where it receives ritual reinforcement in patterns of avoidance sanctioned by the threat of pollution. It is found in many “preindustrial” cities in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East and in the Muslim cities of north Africa, where ethnic and religious particularism may be manifested in separate quarters of the city as well as in occupational specialization. And it is characteristic of the most industrialized metropolitan cities of North America, in which there is extensive segregation of Negroes in residence, worship, education, and social intercourse. Nor does it seem that progressive industrialization will necessarily dissolve ethnic and religious particularisms that are irrelevant to the industrial process and replace them by distinctions resting on more universal criteria of qualification and achievement. This may be the trend within industry, but there is a continuing relevance of ethnic and religious identification as bases of association in the cities and in the extensive movement of urban populations to the suburbs.

Social stratification. The relationship between segregation and rigidity of social structure is equally complex. Segregation is characteristic of societies with complex class systems, although the ecological patterns of class segregation vary and a central city location may distinguish the upper classes in one society, the lower classes in another. There may be extensive segregation of roles in a class system, where residential segregation lays the foundations for segregation in education, religion, and recreation. But the barriers are much more permeable than in caste systems; in fact, in these two systems there is a direct relationship between the rigidity of the system of stratification and the rigidity of the system of segregation. This relationship, however, does not hold for the slave plantations, in which the extreme of social distance was nevertheless compatible with intimate contact. Segregation is one of many forms of institutionalized social distance and not in itself a precise indicator of social structure.

Pluralism

Plural societies have an affinity for segregation, especially when the social cleavages between racial, ethnic, or tribal groups are associated with cultural differences, as in the colonial societies of Africa. The policies of the metropolitan powers imply different policies toward segregation. In theory, Africans who acquire Portuguese or French culture may move freely in the circles of the conquerors, acculturation bridging the social cleavages between them. The British theory of indirect rule, by contrast, maintains the separation between the races by a system of parallel institutions, which extends to the courts of law; legal and other dualisms help maintain cultural diversity, and acculturation does not qualify individual Africans to cross the barriers of segregation and racial cleavage. In South Africa, a system of parallel institutions and consequent segregation serve to foster nationalism among the Afrikaans-speaking white population and to segregate racial, ethnic, and tribal groups under the policy of apartheid.

Patterns of racial and ethnic segregation

Different historical circumstances influence the patterns of segregation between the races. For example, after the conquest of Algiers the French settled inside the depopulated city, whereas in the protectorate of Morocco, which was constituted by treaty with the sultan, they established separate cities adjacent to the Muslim cities (Le Tourneau 1957, pp. 112–113). Segregation is also affected by the extent and nature of administrative regulation. In British and French west Africa, racial segregation was social and customary; in the Belgian Congo and southern Africa, it was legally imposed and sanctioned. In South Africa it is systematized under town plans, which tend to reserve the core of the towns for whites and to move nonwhites to the periphery or beyond or to establish them in satellite towns.

Colonial Africa. Whatever the colonial policy, the historical conditions, or the administrative framework, the general pattern in colonial Africa is one of racial segregation, and in east Africa and South Africa it extends also to intermediate groups such as Indians. The generality of racial segregation in colonial Africa flows from the convergence of many different types of social distance, based on race, power, class, and culture. Inevitably, the lower classes on the fringes of urban life (the so-called sous-proletariat) who live in the improvised shanty towns, or bidonvilles, are recruited from the population of the colonized, and the residents of upper-class neighborhoods are the colonizers. Cultural differences extend racial separation to many institutional spheres. Even in shared institutions (as in the conversion to Christianity), ideologies of domination or sentiments of superiority fuse with cultural and racial differences to create varied and intricate patterns of integration and segregation, including, in extreme cases, reinterpretation of the communion with Christ.

Tribal segregation. Tribal segregation in colonial society is less general and more varied in its forms. In the old cities of Africa, uncontrolled residential patterns permitted tribal concentrations. In the new cities, housing policy, control over the influx of migrants, and the demand for housing all affected the possibility of tribal segregation. In some areas it was discouraged by indifference to tribal affiliation in the allocation of housing; in others, though less often, it was the principle which governed the allocation. Sometimes housing policy and social conditions were sufficiently flexible to permit a measure of voluntary tribal segregation. The relations between tribal hinterland and city, tribal composition and relative concentration or dominance of different tribes, extent and organization of industry, and political structure all have a bearing on the incidence of tribal segregation. Cultural differences encourage the spread of tribal segregation into a variety of institutions, as shown for example in the establishment of separate mosques by many tribal groups in Freetown, Sierra Leone (Banton 1957, p. 137). In general, the acquisition by different tribesmen of elements of a common culture in the urban setting and through the schools, as well as their common subordination to the colonial power and the processes of restratiflcation, reduce the relevance of tribal affiliation and provide new bases of association.

African independence may have different consequences for racial and tribal segregation. In the case of racial segregation, the policy of Africanization is designed to effect desegregation, at any rate in the more public spheres of life; indeed, it may carry the process to the point of an African imposition of exclusiveness. In the case of tribal segregation, there is the bond of common race to bring tribesmen together, and the cultural differences between the tribes are more readily bridged than those between the races. But under some conditions of social structure, that is, where organization of the tribal unit offers access to power, the political struggle after independence may give enhanced significance to tribal affiliation and association.

United States

Segregation in the United States has rested on such varied aspects of pluralism as race, ethnic background, religion, and culture, or combinations of these, in association with class differences. It is most resistant to change in the case of Negroes. Cultural differences between Negroes and native-born white Americans are not marked. The basis of segregation is the general interaction of lower-class status and invidiously defined racial status. Differences in racial status are institutionalized in the structure and culture of the society, although ambiguously, since this conflicts with the democratic ethos. Persons of low racial status have little access to opportunity for achievement, because of segregation in poor neighborhoods and inferior schools and concentration in manual and unskilled occupations. Conversely, the relatively lower levels of achievement reinforce the depreciation of the Negro’s racial status.

The mechanisms of this racial segregation vary. In the South, the enactment of laws to enforce segregation was encouraged by the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (163 U.S. 537, 1896), which held that the provision of separate but equal facilities was not a violation of the right to equal protection of the law under the fourteenth amendment to the constitution. But compulsory segregation did not include racial zoning (in contrast to South Africa), since the Supreme Court refused to accept the doctrine of “separate but equal” as legitimizing residential segregation. In the North, convention, restrictive covenants, discriminatory housing policies, poor wages, and the continued movement of new migrants into low rental areas of established Negro settlement all contributed to a high level of residential segregation, which provided the core for extensive institutional segregation in education, religion, and politics. With the removal of many of the legal supports of racial segregation, pursuant to decisions of the Supreme Court, and despite the official policies of the federal government and a number of states and cities, segregation is still carried forward by various deliberate means, such as the controls applied by boards of realtors, as well as by its own momentum and the consequences of past segregation. Since Negroes were largely excluded from the movement to the suburbs, the central core cities in the great metropolitan areas become increasingly nonwhite as the racially segregated urban populations receive the new Negro and other colored migrants.

Ethnic groups

The patterns of ethnic segregation in the United States are similar to those of racial segregation. Foreign migrants establish themselves in central city areas, in zones of transition, and in the interstices of the city, where they create “Little Sicilies” or Jewish ghettos or other incapsulated communities, which are often characterized by poverty and social disorganization. In this respect they are very similar to the racially segregated communities; however, the ethnic groups and their settlements dissolve more readily in the environing society under the conditions of immense growth and vastly expanding opportunities experienced in the United States. Cultural differences diminish as the political and economic institutions, the schools, and mass media powerfully shape a common culture. With the passing of time, ethnic background tends to become detached from social class and culture. It still remains relevant for association or exclusion, and ethnic enclaves persist and are tranported to new suburbs. But ethnic segregation becomes less general than racial segregation, less discriminatory, and less extensive in the range of roles affected (being emphasized more in primary than secondary relationships). Some ethnic identities have merged into an upper stratum of Anglo-Saxon and north European American identity. Religious identity— that of Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jew— subsumes in some respects the ethnic identity, replacing its exclusive particularism with a more general principle of association.

Comparison of racial and cultural criteria. Comparison of Negro and Puerto Rican segregation in New York City, as it develops over the years, may provide some measure of the relative emphasis on racial and ethnic background in the integration of groups into North American society; however, interpretation is rendered difficult by an admixture of color in the Puerto Rican migration, and by the very different significance, history, and organization of the two groups in the wider society. Probably the situation of Negroes in the United States is unique, and their former slave status may be as relevant as their racial origin.

In England, there are appreciable numbers of colored people who entered the country after World War II; although they constitute little more than 1 per cent of the population, their presence has created an awareness of a color problem. Since they are of varied cultural background (mainly from India, Pakistan, and the West Indies), comparative analysis may yield some insight into both the role of race and of cultural differences in the exclusion and segregation of minority groups in England. If English prejudice against people of other races is only an expression of a more general xenophobia, and not specifically racial prejudice, as some English sociologists maintain, then it follows that cultural difference should be the crucial variable in the exclusion of strangers. The evidence indicates some residential concentration of immigrant groups, whether colored or not, in different boroughs of London, and some dense clusters of colored groups, but also much dispersion. There is exclusion of colored people in primary relationships, much discrimination in rented accommodations, and some discrimination in employment (Glass 1960; Davison 1963; Deakin 1964). But citizenship rights may be fully exercised, regardless of race, and such public amenities as transport are not segregated.

The relations between race, culture, and segregation are, no doubt, indeterminate; they vary in different social contexts and historical situations. Segregation is by no means a universal corollary of racial differentiation. Racial difference may be relevant for social stratification, but expressed little, or not at all, in segregation; or its relevance may be indirect, that is, resting on association with class and cultural differences (the seemingly biological description of groups referring to sociocultural distinctions, as in Mexico); or the reality of racial difference may be submerged in a social myth of racial homogeneity, as in Argentina (Beals 1955; Taeuber & Taeuber 1965; Schnore Evenson 1966).

Since racial segregation rests on relatively enduring characteristics, it is likely to be highly persistent, once it becomes established and linked with structures of domination. But even this is not certain. Residential and other forms of segregation by race may rapidly disappear with sharp changes in the structure of power, as is to be anticipated in the independent states of Africa.

Ideological bases of segregation

After World War II, movements for racial desegregation were stimulated both by changes in the internal structure of the societies in which they arose and by the changed relationship between white and nonwhite peoples in the world structure of power. The emancipation of colonial peoples is essentially an emancipation of nonwhites from white domination. Concerned with eliminating the racial discrimination they suffer in their own countries, they are affronted by its practice in other countries. Since the distribution of races crosses national boundaries, movements for racial desegregation acquire international significance. It becomes increasingly difficult to justify racial segregation as ideologies of segregation are undermined by a world ethos of universal human rights.

Religious doctrines. Ideologies of segregation form around major social values. They may be expressed in religious terms. Thus the concept of pollution regulates contact and avoidance in a most extensive range of roles by supernatural sanctions and by sentiments of deep revulsion for defiling contacts. Doctrines of predestination afford justification for controlling level of contact and for discriminating against persons who are not members of the elect; they may also serve for an extensive regulation of roles.

Resentment of invidious status under theories of predestination may provoke countertheories which emphasize reversal of status. In some of the African Zionist and messianic movements, it is the black prophet who seeks a “New Jerusalem” on earth for the chosen African people or closes the gates of heaven against the white man. In the racially exclusive religious movement known as the Nation of Islam, American Negroes may find eschatological vindication of their race and a rationale in divine destiny for a policy of territorial separation (Lincoln 1961).

Doctrines of racial predestination are not easily maintained in Christian churches, where they are almost universally disavowed. They may reappear, however, in doctrines which enjoin separation, although they abandon the invidious racial distinctions in deference to the world ethos of human equality. In one variant, the existence of separate races is taken as evidence of “divine providence” and of a religious duty to preserve racial separation by avoidance of contacts which might lead to the intermingling of races and loss of racial purity.

Natural instinct theory of segregation

Scientific ideologies rest on assumptions as to the nature of man and of human society. The assumed ubiquity of racial segregation is often taken as evidence that it derives from the instinctive nature of man. There are similar implications, though without racial connotation, in the concept of the fight for “turf” as the human counterpart of the animal instinct for “territory.” A natural instinct theory of racial segregation may serve as an ideology for compulsory segregation, which is thus conceived as consonant with the true nature of man; or it may serve as a defense against compulsory segregation, since the natural proclivity of races to segregate themselves would render compulsion redundant.

Measurement of segregation. The prevalence of racial segregation cannot be doubted, although there is little precise information as to its extent. Segregation may be measured statistically by an index of dissimilarity in the spatial distribution of two groups, or by indexes of segregation, which calculate either the difference between the distribution of one group and all other groups or the deviation from a postulated norm of even distribution. Moreover, an index of segregation may be combined with other measures, such as social rank and urbanization, to yield an urban typology, as in “social area analysis” (Shevsky & Bell 1955).

There are difficulties in the use of these measures of segregation. They are relative to the system of area units used, whether blocks or census tracts; they leave out of account the presence of segregated clusters within units, since they are based on the assumed homogeneity of these units; they may be affected by the relative proportion of the segregated group in the total population; and they measure the results of a complex of factors, not only the influence of the racial factor in segregation (Duncan & Duncan 1955, pp. 215–217). Furthermore, they impose the need for surveys to collect the basic data in countries which do not take a census of their populations or do not inquire into racial identity. But they do provide a basis for comparing racial segregation in different societies and for estimating its extent. In the absence of reliable comparative data from countries other than the United States, in which these measures have been widely used, assertions as to the generality and extent of racial segregation rest on impression.

Other forms of ideological defense

Other forms of scientific ideology postulate the inevitability of conflict in the contact between peoples of different culture or race and hence the necessity for avoiding contact. Or they assert, as a corollary of the natural instinct theory of segregation, that racially mixed areas are inherently unstable and tend to revert to the segregated state. In this conception, when members of a subordinate race “invade” the residential area of the dominant race, the residential cycle ends in a racially segregated area for the invading group, since the original residents evacuate their homes; thus invasion becomes succession. In capitalist society, the protection of property rights and values may provide an ideological defense against desegregation. Prohibition of racial segregation in the leasing or selling of property may be represented as an infringement or diminution of rights of ownership and desegregation as a threat to property values under an assumption of inevitable depreciation.

Refutation of the theoretical assumptions in these ideologies involves the demonstration of contrary cases of stable racial intermingling, of contact without conflict, and of the maintenance, and indeed enhancement, of property values. This type of analysis rejects categorical assumptions as to the nature of man and society and focuses on the conditions which give rise to racial segregation or those which favor the intermingling of races or promote desegregation.

Segregation and prejudice

Desegregation may be effected by revolutionary changes in the structure of the society, as in many parts of Africa, or it may be sought within the existing structure by action against prejudice and discrimination. Segregation is not necessarily associated with prejudice, since it may be maintained by the institutions of society, independently of the attitudes of individuals. But in general, systems of segregation draw support from the prejudices of individuals and indeed foster those prejudices. In situations of systematic racial segregation which permit contact only on a basis of inequality, the routine experience of racial superiority may be expected to intensify sentiments of superiority and sentiments supportive of segregation; these sentiments in turn seek expression in further segregation, so that the levels of both prejudice and segregation are raised by their mutual interaction. Conversely, under certain conditions the experience of contact on a basis of equality may undermine prejudice and weaken the support for segregation. Studies of interracial housing projects in the United States have shown the influence of residential proximity, official policy, and perceived social climate in creating more favorable attitudes (Deutsch … Collins 1951; Wilner et al. 1955). Action programs to promote racial harmony and equality may emphasize desegregation, since racial segregation is mostly overt and public and hence amenable to control by legislation and administrative regulation and since attitudes may be modified by changing the context and experience of race relations.

Leo Kuper

[Directly related are the entriesHousing; Minorities; Prejudice; Region. Other relevant material may be found inCaste; Ethnic Groups; Sects And Cults; Status, Social; Stratification, Social, article on The Structure OF Stratification Systems.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Banton, Michael 1957 West African City: A Study of Tribal Life in Freetown. Oxford Univ. Press.

Beals, Ralph L. 1955 Indian-Mestizo-White Relations in Spanish America. Pages 412–432 in Conference on Race Relations in World Perspective, Honolulu, 1954, Race Relations in World Perspective: Papers .... Edited by Andrew W. Lind. Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press.

Davison, R. B. 1963 The Distribution of Immigrant Groups in London. Race 5, no. 2:56–59.Deakin, Nicholas 1964 Residential Segregation in Britain: A Comparative Note. Race 6, no. 1:18–26.

Deutsch, Morton; and Collins, Mary E. 1951 Interracial Housing: A Psychological Evaluation of a Social Experiment. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

Drake, ST. Clair; and Cayton, Horace R. (1945) 1962 Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. 2 vols., rev. & enl. New York: Harcourt.

Duncan, Otis Dudley; Cuzzort, Ray P.; and Duncan, Beverly 1961 Statistical Geography: Problems in Analyzing Areal Data. New York: Free Press.

Duncan, Otis Dudley; and Duncan, Beverly 1955 A Methodological Analysis of Segregation Indexes. American Sociological Review 20:210–217.

Freeman, Linton C.; and Pilger, John 1964 Segregation: A micro-measure Based Upon Compactness. Syracuse University, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Residential Segregation Study [1964], October 19.

Freeman, Linton C.; and Pilger, John 1965 Segregation: A Micro-measure Based Upon Well-mixedness. Syracuse University, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Residential Segregation Study [1965], February 12.

Glass, Ruth (1960) 1961 London’s Newcomers: The West Indian Migrants. Centre for Urban Studies, University College, London, Report No. 1. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. → First published as Newcomers: The West Indians in London. Chapters 2 and 3 analyze geographical distribution and discrimination in housing.

Glazer, Nathan; and Moynihan, Daniel P. 1963 Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and the Irish of New York City. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press.

Gordon, Milton M. 1961 Assimilation in America: Theory and Reality. Tuedalus 90:263–285.

Gordon, Milton M. 1964 Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origin. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

Grier, George; and Grier, Eunice 1964 Obstacles to Desegregation in America’s Urban Areas. Race 6, no. 1:3–17.

Hodgkin, Thomas L. 1956 Nationalism in Colonial Africa. London: Muller. → Part II, Chapter 1 deals with the new towns of Africa.

Johnson, Charles S. 1943 Patterns of Negro Segregation. New York: Harper.

Kuper, Leo; Watts, Hilstan; and Davies, Ronald L. 1958 Durban: A Study in Racial Ecology. London: Cape; New York: Columbia Univ. Press. → A study of compulsory segregation in South Africa.

LE Tourneau, Roger 1957 Les villes musulmanes de ,’Afrique du Nord. Algiers: Maison des Livres.

Lieberson, Stanley 1963 Ethnic Patterns in American Cities. New York: Free Press.

Lincoln, Charles Eric 1961 The Black Muslims in America. Boston: Beacon. & A paperback edition was published in 1962.

McEntIRE, Davis 1960 Residence and Race: Final and Comprehensive Report to the Commission on Race and Housing. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press.

Osofsky, Gilbert 1966 Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto. New York: Harper.

Park, Robert E. (1916–1939) 1952 Human Communities: The City and Human Ecology. Collected Papers, Vol. 2. Glencoe, III.: Free Press.

Park, Robert E.; Burgess, Ernest W.; and Mckenzie, Roderick D. 1925 The City. Univ. of Chicago Press.

Poll, Solomon 1962 The Hasidic Community of Williamsburg. New York: Free Press.

Schnore, Leo F. 1965 The Urban Scene: Human Ecology and Demography. New York: Free Press.

Schnore, Leo F.; and Evenson, Philip C. 1966 Segregation in Southern Cities. American Journal of Sociology 72:58–67.

Shevsky, Eshref; and Bell, Wendell 1955 Social Area Analysis: Theory, Illustrative Application, and Computational Procedures. Stanford Univ. Press.

Sjoberg, Gideon 1960 The Preindustrial City: Past and Present. Glencoe, III.: Free Press.

Southall, Aidan (editor) 1961 Social Change in Modern Africa. Oxford Univ. Press.

Taeuber, Karl E.; and Taeubeb, Alma F. 1965 Negroes in Cities: Residential Segregation and Neighborhood Change. Chicago: Aldine.

Theodorson, George A. (editor) 1961 Studies in Human Ecology. Evanston, III.: Row, Peterson. → The ecological context of segregation.

Van Den Berghe, Pierre L. 1960 Distance Mechanisms of Stratification. Sociology and Social Research 44: 155–164.

Wilner, Daniel M.; Walkley, Rosabelle P.; and Cook, Stuart W. 1955 Human Relations in Interracial Housing: A Study of the Contact Hypothesis. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

Wirth, Louis 1928 The Ghetto. Univ. of Chicago Press.

Segregation

CHALLENGERS OF SEGREGATION

CONTEMPORARY ISSUES OF SEGREGATION

SOUTH AFRICAN APARTHEID

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Segregation is the practice of keeping racial and ethnic groups separated. This includes, but is not limited to, the separation of racial groups in schools, housing, public facilities, and public transportation. This separation usually involves a dominant racial-ethnic group discriminating against a subordinate racial-ethnic group, as in the U.S. South during legal segregation.

The system of legal segregation in the U.S. South was a totalitarian social system that Southern whites developed and maintained after the abolishment of slavery in 1865. The primary function was to continue the social system of servitude, the racial caste hierarchy, and the economic control of African Americans under the legal fiction of separate but equal. Legal and informal segregation practices (Jim Crow) meant comprehensive racial subordination and imposed a badge of degradation on all African Americans in many areas of the United States. The daily practice of legal segregation is “a compulsory ritual denoting first and second-class citizenship.” It has more than psychological and social significance, serving also the basic economic and political purpose of facilitating the exploitation of nonwhites by whites, collectively and individually (Kennedy 1959, p. 206).

CHALLENGERS OF SEGREGATION

The social system of legal segregation began in the late 1870s and 1880s, and there were several attempts by African Americans to challenge the laws, the violence, and the inequality that resulted from their implementation. The first challenge began with the U.S. Supreme Court case of Homer Plessy, an African American man, who refused to sit in the colored section on a train. His case went to the Supreme Court in 1896. As a result of that case, the laws of racial segregation were buttressed. The decision stipulated that laws mandating segregated areas and sections for blacks and whites, in theory, could be separate but equal.

In 1954, Thurgood Marshall, at the time a successful black attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and later U.S. Supreme Court justice, won the Brown vs. Board of Education case before the U.S. Supreme Court; the case ostensibly ended segregation in public schools. However, the laws of segregation did not come to an official end until the enactment of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. This act resulted in large part from the nonviolent civil disobedience of the black-led civil rights movement from the 1950s to the 1970s, which included minister-leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr. King, famous for his “I Have A Dream” speech against segregation given at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., in 1963, led the Montgomery bus boycott. Rosa Parks (1913–2005), a member of the NAACP, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a segregated bus. Over decades a great many African Americans, including leaders and intellectuals such as Parks, King, Marshall, Malcolm X, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, stood up against the injustices of segregation, lynching, and civil rights violations.

CONTEMPORARY ISSUES OF SEGREGATION

Even though the official segregation system was finally outlawed by the 1968 Civil Rights Act, its reality and impact continue into the twenty-first century. The racial attitudes of whites on surveys since found that ever fewer whites publicly subscribe to the earlier views of the Jim Crow era. Nevertheless, segregated schools, neighborhoods, and churches are still prevalent. In the early twenty-first century, the United States remains racially segregated and racial equality remains more of an ideal than a reality.

The continued spatial isolation and segregation of black Americans have been achieved by a conjunction of racist attitudes, covert and overt discriminatory behaviors, and rooted institutional practices that continue to subordinate black Americans in most institutions. Social scientists have shown the serious repercussions of this for blacks and other Americans.

Social science research has also shown that racial segregation in housing and education still adversely affects the health of African Americans and other Americans of color because that segregation helps to reinforce institutional segregation in yet other institutional areas. Economic inequality is closely linked to racial inequality,

and both operate as strong determinants of major variations in health status.

Although other subordinated racial groups such as Latinos and Asian Americans, as well as some white ethnic groups, have experienced imposed residential segregation in U.S. history, no group has experienced the high degree of segregation and isolation faced by African Americans, “who are twice as isolated as Hispanics and Asians and about 60% more segregated” (Massey and Denton 1993, p. 67). The social, health, and economic repercussions of this residential segregation are similar to the detrimental results experienced by black South Africans in South Africa’s dismantled oppressive system of apartheid.

SOUTH AFRICAN APARTHEID

The oppressive system of apartheid swept through South Africa as a consequence of the electoral victory of the white-racist National Party in 1948. Apartheid embraced a totalitarian racial policy essential to replace the old policy of informal segregation. Legal apartheid controlled and manipulated the space in which black people developed their lives and livelihoods. The main aim of apartheid was total separation of blacks and whites in schools, hospitals, beaches, stores, buses, and housing. Black South Africans were forced to live in subordinate conditions, were separated from their families, were subjected to physical and psychological trauma, and were forced to carry identification cards to move about their country. The white South African government forced black South Africans to live in particular areas called Bantustans and townships. The townships consisted of deplorable one-room shanty houses made of cardboard and scrap metal. Entire families lived in these shanty houses without running water and electricity. These deplorable conditions still exist into the twenty-first century in South Africa. The system of racial apartheid, for many decades during the twentieth century, disproportionately placed all economic, social, and political power in the hands of whites, at the expense of every other racial-ethnic group.

The experiences of apartheid in South Africa for blacks were not unique. The institutionalization of racism there, a process that permeated and perverted every aspect of the individual and collective lives of South Africans, was similar in many aspects to that of the era of legal segregation in the United States. In the early twenty-first century both still have a striking persistence of residential segregation and other racial inequalities in regard to socioeconomic, health, political, and educational resources. South Africa’s history of racial, cultural, and economic tensions still affects black South Africans who were used as a cheap source of labor and who were prevented from purchasing land, voting, and interracial marriage.

Black South Africans resisted the system of apartheid just as African Americans resisted legal segregation. Nelson Mandela, an internationally recognized leader in the struggle for black civil rights, was the head of the African National Congress, whose struggle played a major role in finally dismantling racial apartheid. Mandela was imprisoned in 1963 for his participation in the fight for civil rights, and he spent nearly thirty years of his life in prison. He was released in 1990 and served as president of South Africa from 1994 to 1999. His contributions, accomplishments, sacrifices, and commitment to and for civil rights are recognized and celebrated internationally.

Unlike the United States, South Africa was forced to create the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, with the power to interview white oppressors and their victims, to establish historical documents of the events, to unearth the missing dead, and to grant amnesty, in order to secure a democratic society in South Africa. Mandela’s message of truth, justice, equality, and reconciliation dominated the early days of transition and aided in the success of ending the oppressive system of apartheid. In contrast, neither the U.S. government nor state governments have ever apologized for the enslavement and segregation of African Americans. A truth and reconciliation commission whose work would recognize that history of racial oppression might do for the United States what it did for South Africa.

SEE ALSO African National Congress; Apartheid; Brown v. Board of Education 1954 ; Brown v. Board of Education 1955 ; Citizenship; Civil Liberties; Civil Rights; Civil Rights Movement, U.S.; Du Bois, W. E. B.; Integration; Jim Crow; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Malcolm X; Mandela, Nelson; Marshall, Thurgood; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Racism; Segregation, Residential; Segregation, School; Separate-but-Equal; Supreme Court, U.S.; Truth and Reconciliation Commissions; Warren, Earl; Wells-Barnett, Ida B.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baldwin-Ragaven, Laurel, Leslie London, and Jeanelle De Gruchy. 2000. Learning From Our Apartheid Past: Human Rights Challenges for Health Professionals in Contemporary South Africa. Ethnicity and Health 5 (3/4): 227–241.

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2003. Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Christie, Kenneth. 2000. The South African Truth Commission. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Collins, Chiquita A., and David R. Williams. 1999. Segregation and Mortality: The Deadly Effects of Racism? Sociological Forum 14 (3): 495–523.

Cornwall, Jo Anne. 1986. The United States and South Africa: History, Civil Rights and the Legal and Cultural Vulnerability of Blacks. Phylon 47 (4): 285–293.

Feagin, Joe R. 2006. Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression. New York: Routledge.

Feagin, Joe R., and Karyn D. McKinney. 2003. The Many Costs of Racism. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Fourie, Ginn J. A. 2000. The Psychology of Perpetrators of ‘Political’ Violence in South Africa—A Personal Experience. Ethnicity & Health 5 (3/4): 283–289.

Gibson, James L. 2004. Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation? New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Kennedy, Stetson. 1959. Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A: The Laws, Customs, and Etiquette Governing the Conduct of Nonwhites and Other Minorities as Second-Class Citizens. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. 1993. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Packard, Jerrold. 2002. American Nightmare: The History of Jim Crow. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Patterson, James T. 2002. Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Smythe, Hugh H. 1948. The Concept of Jim Crow. Social Forces 27 (1): 45–48.

Verdun, Vincene. 2005. The Big Disconnect Between Segregation and Integration. The Negro Educational Review 56 (1): 67–82.

Williams, David R., Allen Herman, Ronald C. Kessler, et al. 2004. The South Africa Stress and Health Study: Rationale and Design. Metabolic Brain Disease 19 (1/2): 135–147.

Joe R. Feagin

Ruth Thompson-Miller

SEGREGATION

SEGREGATION. The practice of segregating people by race and gender has taken two forms. De jure segregation is separation enforced by law, while de facto segregation occurs when widespread individual preferences, sometimes backed up with private pressure, lead to separation. De jure racial segregation was a practice designed to perpetuate racial subordination; de facto segregation of African Americans had similar effects, but sometimes could be defended as a result simply of private choice, itself an important American value. Separation of men and women occurred primarily in the workplace and in education. It contributed to the subordinate status of women, but less directly than racial segregation contributed to racial hierarchy.

Racial segregation as such was not a significant social practice before slavery was abolished because slavery itself was a system of subordination. Some northern states prohibited the immigration of free African Americans, reflecting the near-universal desire among whites to live apart from African Americans who would be socially and politically equal. In some northern cities, African Americans tended to live in neighborhoods that were racially identifiable, but de jure segregation was rare because it was unnecessary; there were few public programs of any sort that might be segregated, and de facto segregation produced the same results that de jure segregation would have. The city of Boston maintained a segregated school system from the beginning of the nineteenth century, and in 1845 the state supreme court found that doing so did not violate the state constitution's guarantee of equal liberty, but the state outlawed segregation in public schools in 1855. De facto segregation in railroads and steamboats was common. The practice of taking land from Indians and forcing them to live on reservations was a type of segregation enforced by law, although the U.S. Supreme Court's treatment of Indian tribes as semi-sovereign nations lent a certain theoretical sense to separating Indians and whites into different territories.

The Emergence of Southern Racial Segregation

Slavery's abolition meant that racial subordination could persist only with new kinds of support. Informal practices of racial segregation soon sprang up throughout the South, particularly in railroads and other places generally open to the public. In response, Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which made discrimination in places of public accommodation illegal. The Supreme Court held the act unconstitutional in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), concluding that the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibited states from denying equal protection of the law, did not authorize Congress to adopt laws dealing with private discrimination.

After Reconstruction, whites sought to reinforce patterns of racial hierarchy. Many southern states adopted laws expressly requiring racial segregation in transportation, schools, and elsewhere. The Supreme Court upheld such laws in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited discrimination only in connection with civil and political rights but not in connection with social rights such as were involved in education and transportation. The Court's doctrine indicated that states could require racial segregation only if the facilities provided the races were actually equal, but no state took the requirement of equality seriously, and the segregated schools and railroad cars available to African Americans were, typically, substantially worse than those available to whites. The Supreme Court's approval of segregation spurred southern legislatures to extend the Jim Crow system much more substantially to include separate seating in courtrooms; separate water fountains from which to drink; separate Bibles for swearing oaths in court; and separate swimming pools, parks, and golf courses.

De Jure Racial Segregation Declines, De Facto Racial Segregation Rises

African Americans continually mounted legal challenges to segregation, focusing at first on the inequality of facilities. Eventually, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), the Supreme Court became convinced that separate facilities could never be equal. As the social importance of de jure segregation declined with the repeal or invalidation of statutes specifically discriminating on the basis of race, the importance of de facto segregation increased. Migration of African Americans from the rural South to urban areas in the South and North led to significant increases in residential segregation, and—in a society where children went to their neighborhood schools—to de facto segregation in education.

Sometimes residential segregation was reinforced by law. In Buchanan v. Warley (1917), the Supreme Court held unconstitutional ordinances that effectively required residential segregation. In response, real estate agents and private developers began to include provisions, called restrictive covenants, in contracts for the purchase of housing that barred resale to purchasers of a race different from that of the homeowner. The Supreme Court eventually, in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), held restrictive covenants unconstitutional, but not before patterns of residential segregation had become entrenched. National housing policy from the 1930s through the 1950s also reinforced residential segregation, as federal housing authorities required developers to include restrictive covenants and supported decisions by local housing authorities to segregate the buildings they owned. When combined with differences in the wealth of African Americans and whites, these policies helped create urban ghettoes in which African Americans and, in some parts of the country, Hispanic Americans were concentrated.

Some antidiscrimination laws enacted in the 1960s provided the legal basis for challenging de facto segregation, but in general such attacks failed. Legislatures and courts regarded de facto segregation as resulting from private choices by people with different amounts of money to spend on housing, and therefore as less morally questionable than de jure segregation. The Supreme Court held that only de jure segregation violated the Constitution. By the early 1970s, Justice William O. Douglas, a liberal, and Justice Lewis F. Powell, a moderate conservative, urged their colleagues to abandon the distinction between de jure and de facto discrimination. The Court never did, however, in part because liberals were concerned that the courts could not successfully take on the challenge of eliminating de facto segregation, while conservatives were concerned that the courts would try to do so.

Gender Segregation

Separation of men and women was also common. Often influenced by labor unions and early feminists, state legislatures adopted what were known as protective labor laws, barring women from particular occupations regarded as inappropriate for women, or restricting the hours women could work while leaving untouched employers' ability to contract with men for longer hours. In Muller v. Oregon (1908), the Supreme Court upheld a state law limiting the hours women could work, noting the extensive information about workplace safety submitted by public advocate Louis Brandeis. In Goesaert v. Cleary (1948), the Court upheld a law barring women from working as bartenders, except when their husbands owned the bars. Sincerely defended as being in the best interests of women who would become ill if they worked long hours, or morally degraded if they worked in certain occupations, the protective labor laws rested on assumptions about women's proper role that were part of a system of gender hierarchy.

The creation of separate educational institutions for girls and women had even more complex effects on the gender system. Women typically took different courses than men did, specializing in subjects that were thought particularly suitable for women who would be running households and caring for others, including children. Separate educational institutions, however, also provided women students a space within which they could develop free from competition with men, and their instructors gave women students models of intellectually engaged mature women whom the students could emulate.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, banning workplace discrimination based on sex, led courts to invalidate protective labor laws and employer work rules that had the effect of creating different departments for men and women. The feminist movement of the mid-twentieth century discredited the assumptions on which protective legislation rested and began to undermine the assumptions that had justified separate educational institutions for girls and women. From the 1960s on, colleges that had been segregated by gender voluntarily abandoned the practice, leaving only a handful of private colleges that admitted only men or only women. In United States v. Virginia (1996), the Supreme Court held unconstitutional the exclusion of women from the Virginia Military Institute, one of the remaining state-run schools that did so—although the Court's opinion suggested that separate education for women might have more justification than did schools for men only.

Voluntary Segregation

In the 1990s, a minor flurry of interest arose in the creation of public schools for young African American men, which would have revived a form of de jure racial segregation. No such schools were created, largely because the nation's commitment against de jure racial segregation was so strong. Voluntary programs of racial separation, in the form of separate dormitories for African Americans at private colleges, had somewhat more support, and defenders of separate educational institutions for women and separate sports programs for men and women could be found even more easily. The different ways that de jure and de facto segregation contribute to creating racial and gender hierarchy seem to account for the stronger opposition to de jure than to de facto segregation, with de jure segregation expressing more clearly a social preference for hierarchy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kerber, Linda. No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998.

Kousser, J. Morgan. "'The Supremacy of Equal Rights': The Struggle Against Racial Discrimination in Antebellum Massachusetts and the Foundations of the Fourteenth Amendment." Northwestern University Law Review 82 (Summer 1988): 941–1010.

Welke, Barbara Y. "When All the Women Were White, and All the Blacks Were Men: Gender, Class, Race and the Road to Plessy, 1855–1914." Law and History Review 13 (1995): 261–316.

Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. 3d rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

Mark V.Tushnet

See alsoBrown v. Board of Education of Topeka ; Civil Rights and Liberties ; Civil Rights Act of 1875 ; Civil Rights Act of 1964 ; Civil Rights Movement ; Desegregation ; Education, Higher: Women's Colleges ; Muller v. Oregon ; Plessy v. Ferguson ; Schools, Resegregation of ; andvol. 9:The Arrest of Rosa Parks ; Pachucos in the Making .

SEGREGATION

The act or process of separating a race, class, or ethnic group from a society's general population.

Segregation in the United States has been practiced, for the most part, on African Americans. Segregation by law, or de jure segregation, of African Americans was developed by state legislatures and local lawmaking bodies in southern states shortly after the Civil War. De facto segregation, or inadvertent segregation, continues to exist in varying degrees in both northern and southern states.

De facto segregation arises from social and economic factors and cannot be traced to official government action. For example, zoning laws that forbid multifamily housing can have the effect of excluding all but the wealthiest persons from a particular community.

De jure segregation was instituted in the southern states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The state legislatures in the

Yonkers, New York, Battles Segregation

In 1980, the justice department and the Yonkers branch of the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) filed a civil lawsuit against the city of Yonkers, New York, the Yonkers School Board, and the Yonkers Community Development Agency, charging that the city had engaged in systematic segregation for the previous 30 years. The plaintiffs alleged that the city government had disproportionately restricted new subsidized housing projects to certain areas of the city already heavily populated by minorities. The case marked the first time racial segregation charges were levied against housing and school officials in the same suit.

After years of preparation and a three-month trial, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York found that the defendants had in fact segregated the city's housing and schools based on racial identity. United States v. Yonkers Board of Education 624 F.Supp. 1276 (S.D.N.Y. 1985). The city was ordered to designate sites for public housing by November 1986, but the city refused to comply during the appeals process. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the racial discrimination rulings (837 F.2d 1181 [2nd Cir. 1987]) but did not resolve the compliance issue. The U.S. Supreme Court denied the city's petition for certiorari, and in January 1988 the parties agreed to a consent decree that established a new housing plan. The Yonkers city council voted to approve the decree, which was submitted to the trial court and accepted. The city was to pass legislation outlining the new housing plan within 90 days.

The city did not pass the legislation by the deadline, and the justice department and the Yonkers NAACP submitted a "Long-Term Plan Order" to the trial court, which ordered the city to pass the legislation by August 1, 1988. The city council did vote, but the measure was defeated 4–3. The trial court held the city and the council in contempt, a move affirmed by the Second Circuit. The city requested a stay of the sanctions from the Supreme Court. The stay was granted, but only for the individual council members; the city incurred stiff fines totaling nearly $1 million per day. The council, by a vote of 5–2, enacted an Affordable Housing Ordinance on September 9, 1988. In 1990, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that the trial court had the right to sanction the city, but it had overstepped its bounds in sanctioning the individual council members. Spallone v. United States, 493 U.S. 265, 111 S. Ct 625, 107, L. Ed. 2d 644 (1990).

In 1993, the Yonkers Board of Education and the Yonkers NAACP reactivated the original case, alleging that while the city schools were no longer pursuing policies that were pursued or implemented in a racially-identifiable manner, vestiges of segregation remained. The plaintiffs included the state of New York in this new suit because, they believed, the state had exacerbated the problem by continually underfunding Yonkers. The trial court agreed with the plaintiffs about the segregation and found that the city needed additional money to carry out meaningful desegregation. The court refused to hold the state of New York fiscally responsible because the state had never affirmatively participated in the segregation. United States v. Yonkers Board of Education, 880 F. Supp. 212 (S.D.N.Y. 1995).

The Second Circuit appeals court vacated the trial court's decision regarding the state's fiscal responsibility, holding that the state had a fiscal obligation to alleviate segregation in Yonkers. United States v. Yonkers Board of Education, 96 F.3d 600 (2d Cir. 1996), cert. Denied 117 U.S. 2479, 138 L. Ed.2d 988 (1996). Still another trial ensued. The state attempted to prove that there were no vestiges of segregation in the Yonkers public schools, but the court thought otherwise and ordered the city and the state to share in the costs of a second desegregation plan—devised by the court—called the "Educational Improvement Plan." United States v. Yonkers Board of Education, 984 F. Supp 687, 123 Ed. Law Rep 544 (1997) (S.D.N.Y.).

The next several years saw little agreement over progress or culpability, but the parties pushed on in the hope of reaching common ground. Early in 2002 a pact was announced that would provide $300 million in state funding to the school district over a five-year period, to be used to fund programs that boost academic achievement for all city students. Under the terms of the agreement, a monitor was supposed to be assigned to ensure that the school district was living up to its promises. As of March 2003 the district had been unsuccessful in filling the position, which led some observers to question its commitment to the pact.

further readings

Feld, Jayne J. 2003. "Schools Reopen Search for Desegregation Pact Monitor." Journal News (March 25).

Reid, Karla Scoon. 2002. "Yonkers Desegregation Suit May Be Nearing End." Education Week (January 16).

cross-references

Civil Rights Acts; Discrimination.

southern states accomplished de jure segregation by creating separate facilities, services, and areas for African Americans. Blacks were separated from the rest of society in virtually every facility, service, and circumstance, including schools, public drinking fountains, public lavatories, restaurants, theaters, hotels and motels, welfare services, hospitals, cemeteries, residences, military facilities, and all modes of transportation.

The quality of these facilities and services was invariably inferior to the facilities and services used by the rest of the communities. Laws in many states also prohibited miscegenation, or marriage between racially mixed couples. If an African American failed to observe segregation and used facilities reserved for white persons, she could be arrested and prosecuted.

In 1896 the U.S. Supreme Court gave explicit approval to segregation in plessy v. ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 16 S. Ct. 1138, 41 L. Ed. 256 (1896). The High Court declared in Plessy that segregation did not violate the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution's fourteenth amendment if the separate facilities and services for African Americans were equal to the facilities and services for white persons. This separate-but-equal doctrine survived until 1954.

That year, in brown v. board of education, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873 (1954), the Court reversed the Plessy decision. In Brown, the Court ruled that state-sponsored segregation did violate the guarantee of equal protection under the laws provided to all citizens in the Fourteenth Amendment. The Brown case concerned only the segregation of schools, but the Court's rationale was used throughout the 1950s to strike down all the remaining state and local segregation laws.

In the 1960s Congress took steps to curtail segregation in private life. The civil rights act of 1964 (42 U.S.C.A. § 2000a et seq.) forbade segregation in all privately owned public facilities subject to any form of federal control under the Interstate Commerce Clause in Article I, Section 8, Clause 3, of the U.S. Constitution. Facilities covered by the act included restaurants, hotels, retail stores, and recreational facilities. States began to follow suit by passing laws that prohibited discrimination in housing and employment. In 1968 the Supreme Court ruled that a seller or lessor of property could not refuse to sell or rent to a person based on that person's race or color (Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., 392 U.S. 409, 88 S. Ct. 2186, 20 L. Ed. 2d 1189 [1968]).

In 1971 the Court held in swann v. charlotte-mecklenburg board of education, 402 U.S. 1, 91 S. Ct. 1267, 28 L. Ed. 2d 554 (1971), that busing schoolchildren to different schools was an acceptable means of combating de facto segregation in schools. However, subsequent court decisions have rejected the forced integration of predominantly white suburban school districts with largely black urban districts, and public education remains effectively segregated in many areas of the United States.

cross-references

Civil Rights; Integration; Jim Crow Laws; School Desegregation. See also primary documents in "From Segregation to Civil Rights" section of Appendix.

SEGREGATION

Segregation is the separation of people based on race, religion, ethnic group, sex, or social class. In the United States, racial segregation has been the most prevalent and visible form. After the abolition of slavery in 1865, laws, known as Jim Crow laws, were passed in most southern states. The term "Jim Crow" referred to an African-American character in a popular song composed in the 1830s, and these laws, already introduced after that time were designed to enforce racial separation. Segregation was not only enforced by law, but also by various forms of physical violence. African Americans were forced to sit only in the back of buses and trains, use "black only" water fountains, and enter through the back doors of hotels and restaurants—if allowed to enter at all. Laws forced blacks to live only in certain sections of a town or city, be educated in separate schools, and obtain health care in separate hospitals or wards. They were also excluded from some governmental jobs.

Segregation not only limited black people physically, but also economically and socially, by blocking access to schooling and jobs. It also served as a form of humiliation and degradation. The Supreme Court, however, upheld segregation laws as late as 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, ruling that "separate but equal" facilities were constitutional. This concept was argued against strongly by both African Americans and whites throughout the United States. Eventually, arguments by Thurgood Marshall before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954 led the Court to declare school segregation unconstitutional. This started a series of legal battles, lobbying efforts, boycotts, and protests, which eventually brought an end to de jure, or legal, segregation and discrimination. Even so, de facto segregation, or segregation in fact, continues, and is evident in housing, education, and a number of other areas. Integration remains a continuous process in the United States.

The long-term impact of years of racial segregation persists even to this day. African Americans continue to live in the sections of cities and towns where they were initially forced to live, and they continue to suffer from a lack of economic and educational opportunities. The long and difficult experience of segregation has also resulted in deep mistrust of whites by African Americans. This has, at least in part, contributed to the noticeable disparities in health status and access to health services. In particular, African Americans appear to be more hesitant to seek medical attention. There are many potential reasons, such as previous bad experiences with white health care providers as well as the fact that they may not be as aware of their health problems as whites because of disparities in the provision of health education. Even after becoming aware of their need for services, however, African Americans may experience many barriers to accessing services (i.e., lack of insurance, transportation). They are also more likely to obtain inadequate care even after overcoming these barriers. These discrepancies are extensively documented in the health-services research literature.

Rachel Jean-Baptiste

Duncan Neuhauser

(see also: African Americans; Asian Americans; Cultural Appropriateness,; Cultural Identity; Ethnicity and Health; Ethnocentrism; Hispanic Cultures; Inequalities in Health; Prejudice; Race and Ethnicity )

Bibliography

Barnes, C. A. (1983). Journey from Jim Crow: The Desegregation of Southern Transit. New York: Columbia University Press.

Bhopal, R. (1998). "Spectre of Racism in Health and Health Care: Lessons from History and the United States." British Medical Journal 316(7149):1970–1973.

Feagin, J. R. "Segregation." World Book Encyclopedia Millennium 2000. Chicago: World Book.

Freeman, H. W.; Blendon, R. J.; Aiken, L. H.; Sudman, S.; Mullinix, C. F.; and Corey, C. R. (1987). "Americans Report on Their Access to Health Care." Health Affairs 6(1):6–8.

King, D. (1995). Separate and Unequal: Black Americans and the U.S. Federal Government. Oxford: Claredon Press.

Wasby, S. L.; D'Amato, A. A.; and Metrailer, R. (1977). Desegregation from Brown to Alexander. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Wolf, J. H.; Breslau, N.; Ford, A. B.; Ziegler, H. D.; and

Ward, A. (1983). "Access of the Black Urban Elderly to Medical Care." Journal of National Medical Association 75(1):41–46.

segregation (USA) A policy predicated upon the physical separation of racial groups and practised in the USA, particularly in the southern states, from the late nineteenth century until the 1970s. Opposition to segregation from the 1950s onward fuelled the civil rights movement. The system of excluding members of one race from public facilities, institutions, or positions was informally in place from colonial times. The informal segregation persisted after the Civil War, but was placed on a legal footing in the late nineteenth century, most famously in the 1896 Plessey v. Ferguson case. For the first half of the twentieth century, exclusion or second-class provision for African Americans and non-Whites was thus maintained in public transportation, education, entertainment, and religious and military organizations. This was known as the ‘Jim Crow’ system, named after earlier caricature portrayals of blacks. Whites and African Americans were leading separate lives outside (and usually inside) the workplace, where people of colour tended to hold subordinate positions when employed in White organizations.

African American groups responded in protest in different ways. Marcus Garvey and the Black Consciousness movement sought to stimulate Black nationalism and pride, while other groups favoured integration and gradual change. The policy of the increasingly influential NAACP was not to challenge segregation directly but to emphasize the inequality of separate provision. The Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Topeka struck directly at this perspective. Civil rights legislation and further court decisions followed, until all forms of legal segregation, including legislation relating to interracial marriage, were outlawed and given the morally repugnant status accorded to South African apartheid. However, statistical evidence suggests that informal segregation, particularly in housing and education, persisted into the new millennium.

segregation Social processes which result in certain individuals or social groups being kept apart with little or no interaction between them. An almost universal type of segregation is achieved by separate public toilet facilities for men and women. The tendency for people with a common culture, nationality, race, language, occupation, religion, income level, or other common interests to group together in social or geographical space produces varying degrees of natural, voluntary, de facto segregation in patterns of private residence, business districts, educational institutions, clubs, leisure, and other activities.

Even when patterns of segregation appear to emerge naturally, state policy may seek to destroy them, in the interests of achieving greater social integration and related benefits. One example from the United States are the experiments with busing children to schools outside their home area in order to achieve more racially mixed school populations. Equal opportunities and anti-discrimination policies seek to reduce existing levels of job segregation by race or sex.

In other cases state policy actively imposes de jure segregation: that is, a form of segregation imposed by the state, enforcing the rigorous separation of persons or social groups, and backed by law. Certain Islamic states enforce the segregation of men and women in public places and even in private homes. From 1948 to 1991 the policy of apartheid in South Africa enforced the segregation of Whites and non-Whites in marriage, area of residence and employment, and in public and private services. See also COLEMAN REPORT.

seg·re·ga·tion / ˌsegriˈgāshən/ • n. the action or state of setting someone or something apart from other people or things or being set apart: the segregation of pupils with learning difficulties. ∎  the enforced separation of different racial groups in a country, community, or establishment: an official policy of racial segregation. ∎ Genetics the separation of pairs of alleles at meiosis and their independent transmission via separate gametes. DERIVATIVES: seg·re·ga·tion·al / -shənl/ adj. seg·re·ga·tion·ist / -ist/ adj. & n. (in the racial sense).

segregation Separation of a specific group from the rest of society on such grounds as race, religion, or sex. Such separation might be enshrined in law, as in the Southern states of the USA before the civil rights movement or in South Africa in the era of apartheid.

segregation The separation of pairs of alleles during the formation of reproductive cells so that they contain one allele only of each pair. Segregation is the result of the separation of homologous chromosomes during meiosis. See also Mendel's laws.

segregation see apartheid ; integration .